Brooklyn-based artist Swoon will receive the Community Engagement Award from SGC International, and then deliver an artist talk.
Swoon's life-size woodblock and cut-paper portraits hang on walls in various states of decay in cities around the world. Swoon has designed and built several large-scale installations, most notably the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects in 2008. Her pieces have been collected by of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. Major pieces have appeared at MoMA PS1, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Black Rat Press. For the past several years, Swoon has been traveling in the United States and abroad, creating exhibitions and holding workshops.
Swoon is also known for her work as an instigator and collaborator. She founded the Toyshop collective and the Miss Rockaway Armada, and is a member of Just Seeds and the Transformazium. Since 2006, she has organized four large-scale raft projects and floated down the Mississippi and Hudson rivers with them. Most recently, she and her collaborators designed a flotilla of sea-going rafts that invaded the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Her artistic process is predicated on the belief that art is an immersive, provocative, and transformative experience for its participants. Although Swoon's aesthetics can be seen as an outgrowth of street art, her engagement with ethical living and making art share a close kinship with the idealism of off-grid, barter-based cultures and economies based on sharing. She uses scavenged and local materials and embraces print media as a potent means of action for social change.